NEW THRILLERS
Heads you win
PETER PARLEY
Heads Edward Stewart (Andre Deutsch 30s) Blow the House Down John Blackburn (Cape 25s) Skin Man Martin Tarmey (Barrie and Jenkins 25s) The Devil Finds Work Michael Delving (Collins 25s) The Gaudy Hadows John Brunner (Con- stable 25s) Black comedies are so rare these days both in print and on the screen that one should treasure every manifestation, however slight. The Grand Guignol in Paris has died the death that will surely overtake the panto- mime in the foreseeable future and the friends whom I implored to see Do You Like Women? when it appeared in London some years ago in the dubious locale of Soho, looked at me with a very curled lip. Edward Stewart—I feel after reading his book with many a suppressed snuffle that I should call him Ed — has written a Bostonian black comedy which I welcome with open arms.
Twenty years before the plot begins the Rice Pudding Club of Eli College—and no marks are given for recognising Harvard's own Hasty Pudding Club—staged a winner of a musical called In the Bag which ex- plored the possibilities of decapitation and also exploited the variegated talents of several students who have, as the book begins, achieved some celebrity in their own right. First to go is Dr Langsam, prominent musicologist of a retiring disposition, who is- invited to an alfresco squash game by a fellow alumnus he hardly remembers and regrets only as his head bounces around the squash court. The next victim, gleefully be- headed on the Long Island Rail Road by a Mexican lady, is a placid Episcopalian rector who also played a part in In the Bag and both the police and the boozy sleuth, also late of Eli College, put two and two together to make a musical come to life. The dé- nouement is delightfully vague but thoroughly appropriate in the circumstances and makes one wish that the whole cast would come dancing back into view on a sort of Sunday Palladium revolving stage.
John Blackburn's Blow the House Down is a macabre entertainment by an accomplished thriller writer. Not macabre in a specific sense but merely disturbing in some of its implications. The town of Randelwyck is rapidly falling apart under the strain of racial division, and what appears to be a generally acceptable solution—the elderly architect Sir George Strand's swansong con- ception of a multi-storey tower housing estate linked by bridges which incorporates creches and other communal amenities to bring the black and white populations together—rapidly becomes a catalyst for all kinds of local and extramural dissension, A
local council employee sees an alarming tremor in a scale model of the tower block under wind tunnel conditions, and even more alarming is a bomb attempt by a deranged scientist who admits membership of a secret society called God's True Sailormen. This is the most horrifyingly plausible of Mr Blackburn's contentions and an idea which could have been more fully explored. God's True Sailormen—even the name has an un- easy ring about it—is a society founded by a straightlaced naval man anxious to keep his matelots from mischief on shore and turned rapidly into an international Ku-Klux-Klan fanatically opposed to racial miscegenation and determined to prevent it by the most drastic means. Mr Blackburn has deployed a wide range of characters with great success on a small stage and their proximity gives malicious point to their individual aspira- tions.
Skin Man explores the twilight world of the amateur drawn haplessly into espionage; a familiar enough theme but presented here with a splendidly visualised picture of a highly unusual job, that of the professional dealer in rabbit skins faced suddenly with myxomatosis and the total extinction of a family business built up over a century. The hero is a hard-bitten character, forever skin- ning rabbits with a very convincing bone- weariness, totting up the accounts, and, to his infinite regret, the innocent receiver of mysterious cylinders consigned from behind the Iron Curtain in returned rabbit-skin bags. His decision to eschew all connection with the espionage game is unwillingly re- versed by his involvement with a delightful child of nature picked up on a brief holiday in France and his subsequent involvement with his Eastern European client who has unaccountably reneged on a large debt. Martin Tarmey's plot may be familiar enough but his hero is uncomfortably life- like in his obsessive striving to keep up a family business against impossible odds.
After the inevitable gamut of cold-war plots it is almost relaxing to return to the sleepy Cotswold village ethos of the tradi- tional English detective story. The Devil Finds Work is one of those delightful, almost anecdotal, novels about traditional mayhem on the village green. Two Ameri- can rare book dealers, a species for whom I have the greatest sympathy, descend on the countryside on a summer buying trip and are rapidly involved in some nasty church desecration centred inevitably on a local resident who was in his youth the Aleister Crowley of London society and is patronised by the local squire, a former disciple who has much to hide. Sacrilege and murder result, but all is sorted out in the end. The beauty of all thrillers of this sort is surely their effortless evocation of a John Buchan village society composed en- tirely of dandelion-wine imbibers, the sunlit perpendicular church tower, gin before lunch and the effervescent, all-pervading, smell of new-mown hay.
Even more poignant is John Brunner's The Gaudy Hadows, set in a London which must date from immediately post-war years with a marvellous night-club entertainer called Bitchy Legree (shades of Hutch with a touch of Danny La Rue) who acts as a kind of sounding board for all the hot gossip of the night club circuit. Laird Walker, recently arrived in London, tries to investigate the death of his old friend Sammy Logan, playboy and quiet philan- thropist, who apparently died of shock when entering his mews flat. With the help of Bitchy Legree he uncovers a particularly nasty line in society drug-pushing and avenges his friend's death. What makes this novel a must is its peculiarly 'fifties feeling for the hinterland of the Chelsea set with its snappy' mews flats, night club discuses, and drugs in an era when they were exclu- sively purveyed by sinister doctors with twirly moustaches.
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